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The Bard's language was so pithy and ahead of its time that it still peppers our everyday speech

Shakespeare is celebrated as a great playwright who bequeathed us a rich gallery of characters and an unparalleled collection of dramas, written in a language which has inspired and influenced generations of poets.

However, Shakespeare gave us another gift for which we should be grateful: he helped forge not only the language of great poetry but also the language all of us continue to use day by day.

Shakespeare's language can be difficult and obscure to the modern ear, but watching any performance of one of his plays we are frequently jolted out of our bemusement by a phrase so vivid and familiar that we think it could have been written yesterday and that the producer and the actors must have been tampering with the text to make it seem racy and up to the minute.

I remember having this suspicion watching a performance of The Taming of the Shrew. When Lucentio says to Hortensio, who is giving Bianca a lute lesson, "Spit in the hole, man, and tune again", I thought it was an addition, but no, there it is in the text. Similarly, in Coriolanus we find "Let's make the best of it" and "fob off ".

Henry VIII has the starkly idiomatic "What do you take me for?" The Merry Wives of Windsor has "neither here nor there"' and "what the dickens". Macbeth has "the be-all and the end-all", "a charmed life", "the milk of human kindness" and "at one fell swoop". Julius Caesar has "it was Greek to me" and "made of sterner stuff ". In As You Like It there is "laid on with a trowel".

The phrases just keep coming. There's "cheek by jowl" in A Midsummer Night's Dream. As You Like It has "you amaze me", "what's that to me", "seen better days", "a parlous state", "bag and baggage", "too much of a good thing" and "dead and buried". In King Lear we find "a man more sinned against than sinning" and "every inch a king".

Derek Jacobi as King Lear in 2010Credit:
Johan Persson

Hamlet gives us "the mind's eye", "take it to heart", "hold my tongue", "more in sorrow than in anger", "the primrose path", "far gone", "the dog will have his day", "brevity is the soul of wit" and "making so bold".

What is going on here? Did Shakespeare invent the phrases, or did he snatch them up from current idiom? And did they survive into modern speech because Shakespeare set them in the amber of his immortal lines, or would they have made it anyway? There is no simple answer to the first question.

For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary cites Shakespeare as the first user in print of the phrase "the seamy side" (it's in Othello), but did he "rescue" it from someone else, or did he invent it himself? There is no way of knowing. So many plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries have disappeared - of the 46 known to have been put on in 1598 only nine have survived - and it is quite possible that the phrase "seamy side" was in one of them, or was floating around in 16th-century idiom.

The second question is not particularly easy to answer either. I suspect, though, that in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries Shakespeare was better known than he is now. It is striking how often writers of those times lard their prose with Shakespearean phrasing, which was obviously crammed into their heads.

The Globe Theatre, LondonCredit:
Bob Masters/Alamy

Shakespeare, above left, coined dozens of phrases that are still in use. Above: David Tennant and Patrick Stewart in Hamlet. Derek Jacobi as King Lear, below. Inset: The RSC's A Midsummer Night's Dream His phrases were in the collective memory, especially among literate people, in a way in which they are not today.

When you read Hazlitt a Shakespearean reminiscence pops up on almost every page. Shakespeare probably did help phrases such as "tongue tied" (used eight times), "foul play" (used seven times) and "fair play" (used five times) to survive. And the same is probably true of "neither rhyme nor reason" and "meat and drink" in As You Like It.

We know that Shakespeare did not invent the phrases "in the twinkling of an eye" and "take your chance", found in The Merchant of Venice, but the fact that he used them has probably been a key factor in their survival. The alternative phrase which was around in Shakespeare's day, "stand to your chance", has not survived, arguably because it did not receive his backing.

Of course, he did invent the phrase "pound of flesh" in the same play, and that has entered the language, used by people who may have never come across the character Shylock.

“Many idioms which Shakespeare 'rescued' or coined himself did not survive, and yet there is no reason why they did not”

Now that such phrases are firmly fixed in the language they will probably survive into a time when Shakespeare is even less well-known than now. The King James Bible had a similar effect, and probably helped to keep odd phrases, such as "set the teeth on edge", "signs of the times", "the land of the living", "the apple of his eye" and "high time" (which is also in Othello), in circulation way beyond their natural life.

It is notable that in a less popular plays, such as Troilus and Cressida, which was never acted between Shakespeare's time and our century, there are fewer of these slangy and idiomatic phrases which have survived.

Now I shall have to cloud the issue further. Many idioms which Shakespeare "rescued" or coined himself did not survive, and yet there is no reason why they did not. In Coriolanus we find "you have made fair hands" (meaning "'you have made a right mess of it") and that did not catch on.

In The Merry Wives of Windsor there is "we burn daylight" (meaning "we waste time") and that is no longer current. Henry VIII has "be found a talker" (meaning "to be a mere talker rather than a doer"), and it hasn't survived. In Henry V there is "that's the even of it" (meaning "that's the truth of the matter"), which did not catch on, whereas "that's flat" in Henry IV Part I did.

As we have seen, As You Like It contains a fair number of familiar phrases still in use, but it also contains ones which could have been useful in modern idiomatic English, but which have disappeared, such as "sticks me at heart", "out of suits with fortune", "smoke into smother", "kill them up", "well said" (meaning "well done"), "the world wags", "do him right", "turn him going" (meaning "send him packing"), "out of all whooping" (meaning "past all power of exclamation"), "will after kind" and "omittance is no quittance".

Even Hamlet has phrases which have not survived in ordinary usage, such as "you come most carefully upon your hour", "I am sick at heart", "an attent ear", "when sorrows come, they come not single spies", "we must speak by the card" (where we should say "we must speak by the book") and "the tune of the time". A random process of attrition has removed them from circulation.

It would be nice to see some of the forgotten idioms come back. I'm very fond of the "uncle me no uncles" type of construction - which could be adapted for our times: "Corbyn me no Corbyns" or what have you. Precisely which phrases Shakespeare invented and which he borrowed we will never know.

One thing at least is true: that Shakespeare not only writes verse stuffed with bombast which is the despair of schoolchildren crawling unwillingly to school; he is also master of the pithy, modern-sounding and racy phrase.